ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore aspects of this phenomenon in so far as it pertains to Neoplatonism, inspiration, and the visual arts. It discusses the place assigned to Bacchus and to wine in Marsilio Ficino’s theory of inspiration and health. The chapter examines some iconographic repercussions of Renaissance attitudes to wine and explores instances of the use of wine by artists. It also examines Neoplatonic theory of Dionysiac inspiration presented in the works of Marsilio Ficino in the context of Renaissance artistic practices. The return of Bacchus in Renaissance philosophy is one of the many cultural repercussions of the expansion of wine and wine making which took place all over Europe from the end of the fourteenth century onwards. Early modern ideas on good manners and wine consumption expand in parallel with the Renaissance Bacchanal, inaugurating a plethoric imagery of inebriation. Renaissance patrons might have looked at images through wine; they also very much liked to look at wine itself.
